buckler:he could reach the switches to change channels, and began watching SK television

I've read that North Korea actively jams foreign radio signals. So unless he was near the border and was using a very directional antenna, I'm not sure how he could pick the stations up unless reports I've read about jamming are overhyped.

RamboFrog:So where are all the fawning reviews from the Odorize Wall Street crowd? Isn't this what they want? Free health care, free education, businesses not allowed to make a profit, 'economic justice'?

RamboFrog:So where are all the fawning reviews from the Odorize Wall Street crowd? Isn't this what they want? Free health care, free education, businesses not allowed to make a profit, 'economic justice'?

Anthracite:Why would you want to read a book there or go to an amusement park. I thought no one had money over there.

Nobody does. Things like the bookstore and amusement park exist only so they can be photographed, and shown to the outside world as 'proof' North Korea is just like the rest of the world, while actual North Korean people live in the middle of nowhere and starve.

Are people seriously comparing the conditions in the US to North Korea? Really? Even during the height of the Great Depression, the two things simply cannot be compared. It's ridiculous.

Yes, we all have problems, and some places in the US are shocking. Yes, we need to provide everyone with a quality education and healthcare and the tools to succeed. But seriously folks, get some perspective on the differences.

Dinjiin:buckler: he could reach the switches to change channels, and began watching SK television

I've read that North Korea actively jams foreign radio signals. So unless he was near the border and was using a very directional antenna, I'm not sure how he could pick the stations up unless reports I've read about jamming are overhyped.

Jamming may be only partially effective due to a mix of technical inability and apathy on the part of those tasked with carrying it out. You have to keep in mind that the system is very broken. I'm sure you've heard of Soviet factories churning out defective goods but reporting up the line than everything is hunky dory? That sort of thing is endemic to these regimes and it probably goes on here too. Not to say that they have no capability, and I'm sure that there are more than a few in the gulags because they've been caught, just that it may be spotty.

randomjsa:I still think the nighttime satellite images of the region are more telling than anything.

If you like those, NASA and the NOAA just released a new 'Black Marble' using Oct 2012 data from their fancy new Suomi NPP satellite. I don't mean to spoil the surprise, but North Korea still looks a lot like Mongolia, despite having ten times more people in a tenth the land. Perhaps they're just very assiduous about preserving dark skies for their amateur astronomers.

(Unrelated, but check out the Nile and the Indus Rivers. They look neat.)

If you want to guarantee that no one will take you seriously, go to a thread about a place like North Korea and claim that because the US isn't a poverty-free utopia, the US is as bad as NK and our leaders are as despicable as theirs.

For extra measure, be sure to imply that anyone in the developed world who spends one dollar on their own happiness while poor, impoverished children anywhere are starving is evil and not allowed to say anything about the wrongs of the world or those responsible.

Let's be honest here and have some perspective: For all the biatching we do about our leaders, the nastiest corrupt machine boss in Chicago and the looniest Tea Party legislator in Kansas are angels of decency, honesty, and intellectual integrity compared to the inhuman monsters who "govern" North Korea.

Raithun:randomjsa: I still think the nighttime satellite images of the region are more telling than anything.

If you like those, NASA and the NOAA just released a new 'Black Marble' using Oct 2012 data from their fancy new Suomi NPP satellite. I don't mean to spoil the surprise, but North Korea still looks a lot like Mongolia, despite having ten times more people in a tenth the land. Perhaps they're just very assiduous about preserving dark skies for their amateur astronomers.

(Unrelated, but check out the Nile and the Indus Rivers. They look neat.)

Jesus Christ they were boiling bark to make soup in the 90's but were too proud to ask for food aid until millions had died. America isn't all rainbows and unicorns but don't pretend for a minute we aren't better than them.

Yes better. Cultural relativity will only get you so far. We're better than they are.

rynthetyn:Flint Ironstag: rynthetyn: I really want to go visit North Korea. Aside from the fact that I need to check Kim Il Sung off my "Embalmed Communist Leaders World Tour" list, I'd like to see the country for myself. I always get the feeling that with places like Best Korea that the media is showing only what they want us to see that fits in with their narrative.

I suspect they're actually showing us the 'good' parts, because you can only go where they let you. Hence no pictures of their prison camps etc.

That their 'good' parts look like shiat to us just makes it obvious that their 'bad' parts must be really bad.

/Do North Koreans near the border get South Korea TV?

And this is why I want to go for myself--the "good" parts don't really look much different to me than other developing parts of the world that I've visited. If that house that the farmer woman in that photoset is photographed in is really where she lives, that's nicer than where I lived while I worked in Vietnam. No doubt that there are a lot of shiatty things in North Korea, but I'd like to see it for myself. After realizing that half the stuff we got told about the Soviets when I was a kid were nothing but propaganda and distortions, I don't like taking other people's words for it.

There's a good book from someone who spent a year in North Korea over here:Link (can be freely read online)

The first thing that strikes me is the sheer lack of chaos. Everything is ordered. Everything is simple. It's almost like... well, like the people are cells making up a larger organism. The main reference through which decisions are viewed are not the individual, any more than one of your own cells would start going its own way. Unless it was a cancer cell. And that's exactly the way individuals who stick out are treated - like potential tumours who may become malignant and threaten the structure of the rest of the organism.

It makes sense in its own way - if you can be open to the idea that the individual person is not the only level of consciousness that can deserve rights, that a larger group of people may form a super-consciousness. We already skirt around the edges of this idea even in our very individualistic society, when we talk about special treatment for certain groups of people (be it as broad as "women"). Advertisers are more than aware of it. But it's an idea that we try not to think about too much, while the North Koreans have fully embraced it (even more fully than the Soviets before them).

And they're not exactly shining beacons of good governance, either, but at least they keep to themselves and seem to have plans beyond "rattle sabers until food appears".

The point is that everybody pretends that North Korea is the only country that shows up as black on the map, but it's not true. I'd like some perspective here because I feel like I'm being fed propaganda about North Korea instead of actual facts and information.

rynthetyn:The point is that everybody pretends that North Korea is the only country that shows up as black on the map, but it's not true. I'd like some perspective here because I feel like I'm being fed propaganda about North Korea instead of actual facts and information.

The main reason is that they put so much effort in pretending that things don't suck there. And they spend so many resources that could be spent on a million different things rather then a faulty nuclear weapons program.

Esn:rynthetyn: Flint Ironstag: rynthetyn: I really want to go visit North Korea. Aside from the fact that I need to check Kim Il Sung off my "Embalmed Communist Leaders World Tour" list, I'd like to see the country for myself. I always get the feeling that with places like Best Korea that the media is showing only what they want us to see that fits in with their narrative.

I suspect they're actually showing us the 'good' parts, because you can only go where they let you. Hence no pictures of their prison camps etc.

That their 'good' parts look like shiat to us just makes it obvious that their 'bad' parts must be really bad.

/Do North Koreans near the border get South Korea TV?

And this is why I want to go for myself--the "good" parts don't really look much different to me than other developing parts of the world that I've visited. If that house that the farmer woman in that photoset is photographed in is really where she lives, that's nicer than where I lived while I worked in Vietnam. No doubt that there are a lot of shiatty things in North Korea, but I'd like to see it for myself. After realizing that half the stuff we got told about the Soviets when I was a kid were nothing but propaganda and distortions, I don't like taking other people's words for it.

There's a good book from someone who spent a year in North Korea over here:Link (can be freely read online)

The first thing that strikes me is the sheer lack of chaos. Everything is ordered. Everything is simple. It's almost like... well, like the people are cells making up a larger organism. The main reference through which decisions are viewed are not the individual, any more than one of your own cells would start going its own way. Unless it was a cancer cell. And that's exactly the way individuals who stick out are treated - like potential tumours who may become malignant and threaten the structure of the rest of the organism.

It makes sense in its own way - if you can be open to the idea that the individu ...

That was written in about North Korea in the '80s, it's not useful for looking at what North Korea is actually like now. Back in the '80s things were a lot different everywhere in Asia than they are today. If I were to judge Thailand by travel accounts from the '80s, I'd think it was a backwater shiathole. China in the '80s was way more closed and authoritarian than the present.

I'm not saying that North Korea isn't a mess, but I'm just tired of dated information being presented as if it's anything other than dated. I want to go there and see what the situation really is before I take reporting without a whole shaker of salt. So much of what I was told about the Soviet Union when I was growing up was a mixture of facts and twisted half truths that skewed the reality that I'm not inclined to believe what I'm told about a place without seeing it myself. Not when I've been to as many places as I have where it turned out that reality didn't match up with what I'd been told by the press, and especially not when the American media can't even figure out that the "invisible cell phone" comment during the World Cup was a joke.

If only the population had been allowed to own guns. Maybe then it'd be possible to mount some sort of resistance and fight for freedom rather than existing in some bizarro world where government leaders and military are one and are kings, while you merely exist in a predictable depressing shiathole of which there is no escape.

thatboyoverthere:rynthetyn: The point is that everybody pretends that North Korea is the only country that shows up as black on the map, but it's not true. I'd like some perspective here because I feel like I'm being fed propaganda about North Korea instead of actual facts and information.

The main reason is that they put so much effort in pretending that things don't suck there. And they spend so many resources that could be spent on a million different things rather then a faulty nuclear weapons program.

So we're going to just continue feeding the American populace propaganda in return? I'm sorry, but I'd like to know the actual truth and not the American propaganda version and that's what I feel like I'm getting all the time.

Heck, given the American propensity to invade other countries, I can even understand why North Korea might find it a wise spending decision to develop a nuclear capability. They're not idiots, they know that Pakistan gets treated differently because they've got nukes. But the propaganda version of the story doesn't even allow for the possibility that there might be rational reasons why North Korea would pursue nuclear weapons.

I'm not saying that North Korea isn't a corrupt and impoverished mess, I just want to see information about the place that doesn't reek of the same sort of propaganda that I got fed during the cold war.

rynthetyn, if you want as unbiased a look as possible, read the first book I linked to in my above post. You'll hear directly from the mouths of North Koreans. It talks about the good as well as the bad, and it discusses the fact that many defectors are bitter over the decision to flee their homes. It really is an interesting read.

RamboFrog:So where are all the fawning reviews from the Odorize Wall Street crowd? Isn't this what they want? Free health care, free education, businesses not allowed to make a profit, 'economic justice'?

No, I'm sure they prefer the examples set by Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Dumbass.

Number 30 confuses me. Exactly what victory were they celebrating? Even putting aside the fact that the Korean war is still officially underway (ceasefire was signed, never a peace treaty) how do you look at a country divided in half and decide you won anything? Especially when the other half actually has all the technology and the vast majority of the food. Their soil is pretty much shot and crop yield are dropping. When over a third of the people in your country are farmers and people are still starving something is VERY wrong.

miniflea:rynthetyn, if you want as unbiased a look as possible, read the first book I linked to in my above post. You'll hear directly from the mouths of North Koreans. It talks about the good as well as the bad, and it discusses the fact that many defectors are bitter over the decision to flee their homes. It really is an interesting read.

rynthetyn:miniflea: rynthetyn, if you want as unbiased a look as possible, read the first book I linked to in my above post. You'll hear directly from the mouths of North Koreans. It talks about the good as well as the bad, and it discusses the fact that many defectors are bitter over the decision to flee their homes. It really is an interesting read.

I added that to my long list of books that I don't have time to read.

Yeah - you "don't have time to read" and you sit here whining that you don;t have the right information or some stupid shiat. Get off your ass and go travel ya whiny fark.